I bought my Kobo Touch from FNAC, the French book store chain. This is a note for those in the EU or France considering its purchase from FNAC.

To summarise.. There are a few "feature differences" between plain vanilla KT and those supplied by FNAC. They can all be rectified by using "Factory Reset". The device may be untethered using methods reported earlier for standard KTs and standard firmware updates applied.

Notes

The firmware version on the supllied device was 1.9.16.

The splash screen as the device booted was a branded graphic with: "Kobo by FNAC" emblazoned on it. When the device is turned on for the first time, there is an option to select the default language (English, French, Spanish etc).

During initial setup, there was an option to register with FNAC as well as the standard registration with kobo.com.

By registering with kobo.com, the new firmware (1.9.17) was downloaded and installed.

One notable difference between the FNAC branded OS and the standard Kobo OS was that in:
Home>>Settings>>Sleep & Power
there was no option to toggle the "Book Cover"
Instead, the Sleep Screen and Power Off Screen always dispalyed the FNAC branded screen.

A. Getting rid of FNAC "features"
FNAC branded splash screens and lack of "Book Cover" option were corrected by
Home>>Settings>>Device Information>>Advanced: Factory Reset.
Note that this restores the device to its unregistered state and will delete all user downloaded content (books, config etc). It also appears to eliminate the option to register with FNAC.

Don't do this if you intend to use KT with FNAC online services/store.

B. Skip Registration
During its second setup, I used SQLite3 (on Linux) to skip registration altogether.
Open the file at:
/media/KOBOeReader/.kobo/KoboReader.sqlite
Issue this command:
INSERT INTO "user" VALUES('aaaaaaaa-aaaa-aaaa-aaaa-aaaaaaaaaaaa','aaaaaaaa-aaaa-aaaa-aaaa-aaaaaaaaaaaa','xxxx@xxxx.xx','xxxx@xxxx.xx','2aaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaa==');

E. Restore WiFi
After skipping the registration and manually updating the firmware, the Wifi connectivity was restored by invoking the browser from:
Home>>Settings>>Extras>>Launch Browser
and selecting the WiFi access point and entering the WPA keys.

It doesn't sound like the FNAC customisations are onerous. Given their business model is selling the Kobo to you approximately at cost and then making royalties on e-books, it doesn't seem right to take advantage of that while also working to cut them out of their royalty stream.